Remembering Light and Stone (2 page)

That afternoon, Ted and I had been to see the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. They had only been opened to the public again earlier that spring following restoration. Ted had seen them since then, but I hadn’t. Looking at them it was easy to believe that they would last for such a long time, but they wouldn’t last for ever. No matter how magnificent they are, paintings are made of paint, wood, canvas, clay, and no matter how well they are preserved or restored decay is built into them. Afterwards, because we were so near it, we visited St Peter’s. I hadn’t been there for years, mainly because I don’t like it. As soon as we went in, I could see why. It frightens me. Worse, I feel that I’m supposed to be frightened, that the whole building has been carefully planned to that very end. Usually, I like churches and cathedrals. When I was living in Paris, I used to go to
Notre-Dame
and the Ste Chapelle quite often, especially in winter. What I was talking about earlier – the facility for stepping out of your own age – is something that these churches lend themselves to well. You can feel a sensibility, a belief in an order which has gone now, but which people long for still, and they visit those churches for exactly that. But sometimes people visit such places because they feel they ought to, because the guidebook tells them to go there. As we walked around St Peter’s, I looked at all the other people and I wondered if they liked it, and if so, did they only like it because they felt they should? I suppose all that heavy gilt and marble may appeal to some people. It frightened me. We walked across the wide, empty floors, and looked up at the monstrous, mosaiced cupola. It was too big, and out of proportion. A gothic cathedral, whatever its size, can calm your spirit, and in nature too, a massive tree, a mountain or the ocean itself can have the same effect. I felt, in St Peter’s, the terror you sometimes feel in a completely empty landscape.

And perhaps the most foolish thing of all was that I believed I should identify with it. Like the people who felt they ought to admire it, I thought I ought to feel some sort of affinity, because it was ‘my’ church. I’m still prone to notions like this. I am not a free person. To know it is small consolation.

Nobody was praying. Instead, they were milling about, taking photographs and consulting guidebooks in a variety of
languages
, and then I noticed a small side chapel, reserved for prayer. I thought of Franca, and I asked Ted to wait for a moment while I went in to pray for her.

On the altar, there was a large gold monstrance, with a host in it, and in front of it, kneeling in an attitude of prayer were two nuns. They were both wearing long blue veils which almost covered them completely, veils which reached the floor with cloth to spare. I couldn’t pray: I could hardly contain my anger at seeing those veils, at the crass cynical theatre of it. But then I thought of Franca: she would probably have liked it, been quite impressed by the sight. I think Ted was surprised at how quickly I reappeared.

On that last night in Rome, I couldn’t sleep, because of the heat, and because I kept thinking of where we were going the following day, and I was thinking of the churches, all the churches I knew. Some of them still meant a great deal to me, those medieval churches where the raw power of Christianity could speak to me from the anguished face of a painted angel, over the roar of the traffic, in the heat of the night, as I lay there wrapped in a sheet, feeling the pulse of my own heart, and hearing the voice of a tormented angel scream down through the centuries to me.

The painting was in the main church of S. Giorgio, ‘my’ village, as I thought of it then, my village by adoption. Lots of people visit S. Giorgio, although it isn’t really famous in itself. It’s in central Italy, in Umbria, the part of the country people have in mind when they imagine Italy – pink hill villages, olive groves, vines, frescoes and so forth. People come to visit the general area, and we catch the spillover from some of the more crowded centres. The first time I went to S. Giorgio myself was as a tourist. It was so long ago that I can hardly remember it; I have a memory of the frescoes and of eating an ice-cream with rum in it: a vague, neutral memory. The second time I came back I felt differently about it, and then when I came to live – but more of that later.

It’s an extremely old town, and that’s one of the things I like about it. It was originally Etruscan, and then the Romans built on it. The main town you see today is medieval. There’s a little museum in the square, with the skinny green bronze Etruscan mannikins they dug up there, and a few slabs of Roman stone and old broken pillars, which have never really caught my imagination. S. Giorgio isn’t famous for anything, although the people who live there hate you saying that. They think that it’s foolish that more tourists don’t come, they think that their town is every bit as beautiful as, say, San Gimignano up in Tuscany. I did my bit to promote it: I translated the official guidebook to the town into English. I have to admit it’s a hopelessly uninspired document. It brags its onion festival, much to the scorn of other villages around.

No, if S. Giorgio deserves to be known for anything, it’s for the
fresco cycle in the main church. They’re attractive, but by the standards of what you can see in central Italy, they’re nothing out of the ordinary. Only the most hardened art historian comes expressly to see them. More often, tour buses stop, with people who’ve either just been to, or are on their way to, Assisi. The guide will then use the frescoes to explain just why Giotto or Cimabue or Lorenzetti are such magnificent painters, by
contrasting
them with our poor Maestro di S. Giorgio, and showing them how he fails to fully exploit the space he has, what’s wrong with his sense of perspective, why his sense of composition is so unremarkable, his frequent lapses into sentimentality. All this is true, but then, almost everyone looks feeble in comparison to the likes of Giotto, and the Maestro does have his moments. In part, my fondness for the paintings is based on familiarity, and I like some of them very much indeed. There’s one in particular of S. Giorgio himself as protector of the village, holding a thing like a covered platter with the lid half lifted, and under it you can see S. Giorgio, completely recognizable with its walls and its church and the bell-tower. I like the crafty old faces of the velvet-hatted burgers kneeling at his feet.

The people who come to S. Giorgio usually do as the
guidebook
suggests. They visit the church and the museum. They buy bottles of the local wine, take photos, maybe have lunch, and then move on. They think they’ve seen S. Giorgio, but they don’t realize that they’ve seen only one of its manifestations. Italy is a deceptive country, ours a deceptive village. There are at least three different S. Giorgios.

There’s the pretty medieval hill town that people visit in the summer. The same village is completely different in winter, which came as a real surprise to me the first year I was living there. It was late October, and I was walking across the square when I suddenly realized that the crowds of tourists hadn’t thinned, but had gone completely. There wasn’t a single coach around, nobody taking photographs or writing postcards. The tables were moved in from the streets outside the bars; all the pottery and the other souvenirs were taken in, and most of the little shops were locked up for the winter. The place was
deserted, although it wouldn’t be true to say that I was the last foreigner there.

Quite a few Germans and English people have bought houses in or near S. Giorgio. Some of them are just holiday homes, but many foreigners have settled there, not all of them happily. Some of those who are quite contented aren’t at all well integrated into the community, and they don’t even realize it.

S. Giorgio even looks very different in winter. The light is all important here, and on a summer evening in particular, it draws a deep golden creamy colour out of the stones from which the town is built. You don’t see that colour at all in winter, when the sky darkens and a bitter wind blows across the square, and makes the narrow streets look gloomy. Many of the visitors who come in summer would be shocked to see the village in winter, because they would see that it’s as dreary and provincial as the places they left, and the illusion of summer would be destroyed.

The third aspect of S. Giorgio is there to be seen by anyone who comes at any time of the year, but it’s the least considered because people don’t want to see it. The part of S. Giorgio I’ve been talking about so far is the old part of the town, up on the hill. As is the case with almost all the Italian hill villages which are visited by millions of tourists every year, there’s a modern part to S. Giorgio. It begins outside the town walls, with a few stray houses, then a few blocks of apartments, then the whole thing spills down the side of the hill and gets properly into its stride, almost as a village in its own right. The railway station for S. Giorgio is down there. When you arrive you can get to the upper village by bus, or if it’s not too hot you can walk. People who come to visit generally get the hell out of it as fast as they can, they have a sublime facility for pretending they haven’t even seen it.

For the lower part of the town is too like the places they’ve left, as brash and vulgar and unattractive as modern provincial towns anywhere in Europe. The housing there is generally blocks of apartments made of cement with brown sliding shutters and little balconies. Italy uses more cement every year than any other country in Western Europe, a fact which people generally don’t
want to know, because it doesn’t fit with the image they have, but if you go there and keep your eyes open it won’t seem too surprising a statistic. Just beyond the village is a big wide autostrada. It cuts through the plain and goes north past Assisi and Perugia, then on up to Siena and Florence.

The oldness of S. Giorgio means very little to the people who live there. Some of them work in the tourist industry, but most of them work in commerce, in shops or in the big warehouses and factories on either side of the autostrada (as I did, when I lived there, I worked as a translator in a clothing factory). There are factories which make food and clothes, office furniture and tableware. The people who live in the lower town think nothing of the frescoes, and years can pass without their going up to the church. People start work early, and in the evenings after dinner they watch TV. Most families have at least two huge televisions. Sometimes the men go out to the bar, still a male preserve, where the older men play cards in back rooms. The young boys eat
ice-creams
, listen to Phil Collins on the jukebox, or stand in packs around the door of the bar and have little tussles and fights with each other. Whatever they do, it’s done with a sense of
restlessness
, a lack of repose, wandering in and out of the bar or flicking the remote control of the television from one channel to another. The lower part of S. Giorgio is much more interesting than the upper part, if you really want to know what contemporary Italian life is like; it’s a microcosm of so many towns. It lacks that grace which people come to Italy to find, and so they generally chose to ignore it.

The church with the frescoes is in the main square of the old part of S. Giorgio. Directly opposite it there’s a small grocery store. The people who owned and ran the shop were a couple called Franca and Davide. They lived in an apartment above the shop, and I lived in an apartment above that again. Franca used to be in the shop all morning, from half past eight until one o’clock, leaning over a big glass counter full of cheese and cold meat. They sold everything you could want. Fresh bread was delivered every day, and the smells of all the things mixed together in a wonderful way – coffee, fruit,
mortadella
and
capocollo,
parmigiano
and
scamorza,
garlic and floor cleaner – it was extraordinary how well they combined. Franca ran a tight ship. She might occasionally pretend to defer to Davide but in fact she was completely in charge. The apartment in which I lived was for Lucia when she married. As is fairly common practice in that part of Italy, Franca and Davide had made early provision for their daughter. The whole apartment was beautifully fitted out, so they knew that when Lucia got married she would have a home all ready – she would simply move upstairs. Lucia herself was very contented about this, although she regarded it as nothing out of the ordinary. All this was explained to me when first I rented the apartment. Franca told me that she would never rent to Italians, only foreigners, because once locals got in she would never be able to get them out again. When I moved in, Lucia was only ten, and I was amazed when the reason for the apartment was explained to me. I was still there by the time Lucia was fifteen. She helped Franca in the shop in the afternoons and at weekends. Franca herself did very little housework, for they lived with Davide’s mother, who was very old but still capable of keeping everything in perfect order. When Franca and Davide closed the shop every day at one o’clock, they came upstairs to find lunch all ready on the table. I got back from the factory about fifteen minutes later, and often, when I was on my way up the stairs, there would be a wonderful smell of
ragu
wafting out from their apartment.

Quite often I would be invited down for a meal in the evenings, or for Sunday lunch. They felt that it wasn’t good to eat alone, and it was particularly bad to be on your own on Sundays. If she knew that I was only having something like bread and cold meat for Sunday lunch, Franca would be baffled and vexed. She was a good friend to me. I think we got on well because we were so different, we didn’t ever expect to fully understand each other.

I fitted in well in S. Giorgio – eventually, and as well as I would ever fit in anywhere, which isn’t saying much. I look very Italian, which did help. I’ve got long dark curly hair, and brown eyes, and I’ve also got an unusually dark complexion for an Irish
person. I dressed as well as an Italian too. I made a special effort, particularly for my job. I don’t think I’d have been respected if I hadn’t done that, and although I hated that attitude, I went along with it reluctantly, in a spirit of compromise. You have to, at times, if you choose to live in a country which isn’t your own.

Another thing about me is that I’m very small, barely five foot one, and I look very little and sweet, which is a good front. Even now, I’m still constantly amazed at how foolish people can be, how, if you’re Irish or little or you’ve got a soft voice, they’ll think they have the measure of you at once, and that you must be really nice. I also speak Italian very well. I studied French and Italian at university in Ireland, but it’s from living in S. Giorgio that I became so fluent. I’m even quite good at the local dialect, and I’m a real expert in textile vocabulary. I know all the words and expressions for things like ‘bias-cut’ and ‘piping’ and ‘set-in sleeve’ and ‘overlock hem’ from my work in the factory. I think I was quite well liked in S. Giorgio. They treated me as a local in all the bars, that is, they didn’t charge me the outrageous prices they usually make the visitors pay.

However, the thing that made me a total anomaly in Italy was that I’m a real lone wolf. I’ve never felt the need for much company. I’ve never really liked family life, which is one of the great sacred cows of society, and not just in Italy. People act like you’re strange, mad or bad if you admit that you simply don’t care for it. I built up a life of my own in S. Giorgio, a solitary life. I used to like going down to visit Franca and the others, but I used to enjoy leaving them too, and being upstairs on my own again. A thing I often noticed in Italy was that being together is one of the most important things for people, but it doesn’t really amount to much. They might get together for a meal, but then not communicate much – at least, not by my standards of communication. That made it easy for me to socialize, for so little was expected. I used to go downstairs and quietly eat my way from the
antipasti
through to the ice-cream with just the
occasional
comment about how good the wine was, or to ask where they got the cheese. Every so often somebody would say,
‘Va
bene,
Aisling?’
and I would reply,
‘Si,
va
bene,’
and keep eating.

My job in the factory was a means to an end. I didn’t feel hard done by because of that, partly because I know it’s more or less like that for everybody. I liked the feeling of being one of the huge mass of humanity that makes and sells things, of being a little part in the process that keeps the material side of life going on, that keeps food on the tables, or in my case, clothes in the shops for people to buy.

I’ve always placed a high value on my independence, and I’ve always known what I wanted out of life. I think my aims at that time were fairly modest, and I was pleased with the life I had worked out for myself. My inner and intellectual life was the most important thing, and though I kept quiet about it, almost everything was geared to that. I started early in the factory, at about half past eight in the morning. I hated that, but by one o’clock I was finished for the day. I’d drive back to S. Giorgio and have lunch, and then in summer, when it was really hot, I’d sometimes lie down again in bed for an hour or two. Then after that, or straight after lunch in cooler weather, I would do the extra bits of translating that came my way now and then – things like the guide to the village, or letters and orders for smaller factories that only did a little export work, and couldn’t afford a full-time translator. I used to do quite a bit of extra work, and I always tried to get it over as fast as I could, so that the rest of the day was mine.